Conventional techniques used to render and view digital content are limited by both how digital content is captured as well as the devices used to display the content. One example of this is that conventional digital content is captured to have a single fixed field of view when rendered. A field of view, when referring to digital content rendering in the following, refers to an angular amount of a user's environment that is consumed in rendering of the digital content.
Conventionally, the field of view, also referred to an angle of view, is limited to an angular extent of a given scene that is imaged by a camera. This angular extent of the given scene is then rendered, conventionally, by a display device having a fixed amount of display area. Accordingly, the angular extent of the scene that is captured by the camera in forming the digital content also limits the display of the digital content to a display area that is made available using conventional display devices. As such, a field of view used to render the digital content using these conventional techniques remains fixed.
Cinematic techniques may be used to address these limitations, e.g., through panning and magnification. For example, panning and magnification may be used to alternate between feelings of intimacy or expansiveness when viewing indoor outdoor scenes in the digital content, respectively. However, these conventional cinematic techniques are still limited by the available display area of the display device used to render the digital content such that a field of view of the digital content, when rendered, does not change. For example, in conventional techniques that involve alternating between feelings of intimacy or expansiveness when viewing indoor outdoor scenes in the digital content, the rendered frames consume the same amount of a display area of the display device. Accordingly, a user's field of view when watching these scenes does not change.
Techniques have subsequently been developed to support an expanded field of view when compared to conventional display devices above, e.g., such that a user may be exposed to immersive digital content that appears to surround the user in augmented and virtual reality scenarios. The user, for instance, may wear a head mounted computing device that includes display devices that support a stereoscopic display. From this, a user may be immersed within an environment formed by the digital content that appears to surround the user, even to the point at which the rendering of the digital content consumes nearly an entirely of a field of view that may be viewed by a human eye, e.g., 180 degrees.
Conventional techniques that have been used to render digital content in these scenarios, however, are limited to recreation of a conventional viewing experience having a fixed field of view. A user viewing a movie within a virtual reality environment, for instance, within a conventional system, is typically exposed to a virtual movie theater in which the digital content is then rendered on a virtual movie screen having a fixed size. Consequently, this rendering of the digital content is limited to conventional cinematic techniques and ignores the potential of the expanded field of view of subsequently developed display devices.